Saturday, December 16, 2017

What would you do if...

As a bit of a "get to know your neighbor" exercise or part of a team building exercise, have you ever been confronted with one of those "What would you do if..." scenarios?

My socially awkward and introvert nature (through some innate mechanism of self preservation) normally helps me evade such team building exercises, but every so often I do get caught out and I'm forced to offer up an answer to the posed scenario.

The last couple of times the posed question (or a permutation thereof) has been "What would you do if you were guaranteed to be financially secure and could choose to do anything you wanted to do - with no worries over money?" i.e. money is no object. It surprises me how many people will answer along the lines of building schools in Africa, working with war veterans, helping the homeless, etc.

Perhaps its a knee jerk response if you haven't really thought about it and re-actively think of something that you expect your new found group of friends and colleges will appreciate, or maybe it is genuine... but for me, such a thought seems so shallow.

I've often dwelled and retrospectively thought about the twists and turns of my career, my family life, and where I screwed up more than other times etc. and, along the way, I have though many many times about what I'd do if I were ever financially secure that I could chose to do anything.

Without doubt (OK, maybe a little trepidation), I'd go back to University and purse a degree and career in bio-medical engineering research. But I don't have any desire to be a doctor, a surgeon, or pharmacist.

I'd cast away my information security career to become someone driving research at the forefront of medicine - in the realm of tissue, organ, and limb regrowth... and beyond. And, with enough money, build a research lab to purse and lead this new area of research

You see I believe were at the cusp of being able to regrow/correct many of the disabilities that limit so many lives today. We're already seeing new biomedical technologies enabling children deaf or blind from birth to hear their mothers voice or see their mothers face for the first time. It's absolutely wonderful and if anyone who's ever seen a video of the first moments a child born with such disabilities experiences such a moment hasn't choked up and felt the tears themselves, then I guess we're cut from different sheets.

But that fusion of technology in solving these disabilities, like the attachments of robotic limbs to amputees, is (in my mind) still only baby-steps; not towards the cyborgs of science fiction fame, but towards to world of biological regrowth and augmentation through biological means.

Today, we see great steps towards the regrowth of ears, hearts, kidneys, bone, and skin. In the near future... the future I would so dearly love to learn, excel, and help advance, lies in what happens next. We'll soon be able to regrow any piece of the human body. Wounded warriors will eventually have lost limbs restored - not replaced with titanium and carbon-fiber fabricated parts.

I believe that the next 20 years of bio-medical engineering research will cause medicine to advance more that all medical history previously combined. And, as part of that journey, within the 30 years after that (i.e. 21-50 years from now), I believe in the potential of that science to not only allow humans to effectively become immortal (if you assume that periodic replacement of faulty parts are replaced, until our very being finally gives up due to boredom), but also to augment ourselves in many new and innovative ways. For example, using purely biological means, enabling our eyes to view a much broader spectrum of the electromagnetic spectrum, at orders of magnitude higher than today, with "built-in" zoom.

Yes, it sounds fantastical, but that's in part to the opportunities that lie ahead in such a new and exciting field, and why I'd choose to drop everything an enter "...if you were guaranteed to be financially secure and could choose to do anything you wanted to do - with no worries over money."

About Me

Hi, I'm Gunter Ollmann and I've been earning a living in IT (mostly in consulting) since the late 1980's. For the last decade or so I've been focused exclusively on Internet security - having built and led multiple professional hacking and security research organizations around the world.
I'm founder of Ablative Security Inc. and currently CTO for Security within the Cloud + Enterprise Security division at Microsoft - formerly CSO at Vecta AI, CTO at NCC Group, formerly CTO at IOActive, and former Chief Security Strategist at IBM Internet Security Systems. I tend to spend a lot of time investigating new threat vectors and cybercrime, taking a long-term strategic view of how Internet security is evolving, and helping define the protection technologies and services we'll need for the future.
You can also follow me on Twitter - http://twitter.com/gollmann Note that any comments and blog postings here on Blogger are my personal thoughts and opinions, and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.